Gunslinger 07, page 2
‘I would be obliged if, for the present, none of you was foolish enough to attempt to brave this fellow.’ Quartermain slowly turned to face Ryker, his pistol still in his hand.
‘Hold it, Englishman,’ snapped Ryker. ‘That’s far enough with your pretty four-forty Wilson.’
‘You recognize this gun?’ Quartermain was clearly surprised. The splinters of glass driven into the palm and fingers of his left hand seemed forgotten.
‘Sure. That’s my trade.’
‘Knowing guns, my dear sir, or simply shooting them? From our brief experience, it appears to me that you have an equal facility with either skill.’
‘I like everything about guns, Mr. Quartermain, except some men who use them. Like you and this gang of bully-boys were using them against that shopkeeper.’
‘Perhaps we were a trifle exuberant.’
‘You carry a gun to back up what you are. Not to try and be something you’re not.’
Quartermain bowed to him, but there was a hint of mockery in the movement. ‘A philosopher as well, Mister …? I believe you have the advantage of me. You have my name and I don’t have yours.’
‘I’m Jack Ryker. Can’t say I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Quartermain. I suggest you take your men and move on out.’
‘Leave this hostelry?’
‘Yeah. And Tucson. I heard you say you were headin’ for the border. Make sure you’re out of Tucson by sunup.’
‘Or you’ll kill us all?’ grinned the man with the torn shirt, trying to ease behind the half-breed to use him as a shield for a quick draw. Ryker was ahead of him. ‘Another step and you go first, boy.’
‘Hell, Mr. Quartermain!’ spat the young boy with the greasy hair. ‘Up there on his ownsome and he’s holdin’ us here.’
‘I personally credit Mr. Ryker with some expertise in this sort of affair. I believe he has us, what is the expression? He has us cold.’
‘Guns down and then walk on out. Collect ’em from Haggard here in the morning.’
‘What?’
‘By God, mister!’
‘Silence!’ There was no doubt that Quartermain had his men well drilled. Though Ryker sensed that they were all trembling with anger and a desire to blow him apart, their boss had enough sense to realize that the gunslinger had the drop on them all. It was a standoff, and Ryker suspected that there might be killing before the drama ended.
‘How d’you know what this gun was, Mr. Ryker? I am intrigued. My men looked at it as if it was something I had purchased on a trip to the moon.’
‘I make guns. Repair them. And use them. Before I give you and your party a talk on the Wilson, I’d like some hands scraping at the air. I don’t like the way your tame breed’s sneakin’ down for his knife.’
The movement stopped.
All of the party stood very still, waiting for a word from Steven Quartermain.
‘Damned nerve, Mr. Ryker. I like that in a man.’
‘Hands in the air.’
Slowly they all obeyed him, and Ryker relaxed. It was a dangerous situation. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that his life was balanced on a hair. If he could simply have gunned them down he would have done. But even if he killed a man with each bullet, there’d still have been some left over. At the moment they believed he could kill five out of eight. And those weren’t very good odds to stake your life against.
‘You were going to illuminate our minds with a lecture on the subject of my hand gun, sir.’
Times back, a shootist had stopped off at the little gun-repair business that John Ryker had run. Before the hideous events that had sent him out on the trail as a hunter of bounties and killer of men.i
He’d been a strange, solitary man, with an unlit, thin cigar drooping from his narrow lips. Wearing a Mexican serape draped over his shoulders, hiding his low-slung pistol. He’d said very little, discouraging Ryker’s attempts to strike up a conversation. But something he had said stuck in Ryker’s mind.
‘If you came to talk, then talk. But if you’ve come to shoot, then do it.’
It was good advice.
And Jack Ryker was about to allow his conceit with his own skill and knowledge of guns to override it. But next to working with guns, he enjoyed talking about them. And the massive Englishman’s pistol was rare as desert rain in the South-West.
While he talked he kept the Navy Colt moving gently backwards and forwards to cover the group of men. Hammer back and finger steady on the trigger. Though there had been a whole range of developments in firearms in the twelve years since Colt had first brought out their thirty-six caliber Navy model pistol, Ryker had not yet found (a gun that suited him better. It was a tightly-made hand gun, shooting well and easily, with a finer balance than any other pistol that Ryker knew. And the smaller bullet didn’t make a lot of difference. If you hit a man with a Navy Colt then he was going to stay hit.
‘First man breathes too deep finds it’s his last breath,’ he warned.
The saloon was dark. Two of the lamps, untended by the barkeep, were guttering, sending a smell of smoky oil across the room. Haggard had helped Solomon King to his feet and the two of them had disappeared through a curtained door behind the bar. Apart from the eight members of the hunting party and Ryker, the What Cheer was deserted. The only sound was the steady drip of blood from Quartermain’s cut hand. The Englishman had made no effort to staunch the flow, simply waiting for Ryker to speak, bowing slightly forward as if he was making polite conversation with the Bishop of Norwich on the cathedral lawns.
‘Your pistol’s made by Wilson in London, I guess ’bout twenty years back. Percussion gun … what we call a Lang-type transitional pistol. Beautiful gun. Hammer offset to the right so you can sight properly with it. Very easy to cock and fire. What else?’ He was mentally ticking off the points in his head. One of the men shuffled his feet, the noise loud in the evening quiet.
‘What bore is it, Mr. Ryker?’
The gunslinger smiled. ‘Kind of a trick question, that. Sixteen grooved rifled barrel, five and three quarters of an inch long. Bore’s four-forty. Cylinder’s clover-leaf and it’s got six chambers. Each of them drilled to four-sixty caliber. Recessed chambers. Lets the barrel breech fit in snug and you don’t get any gas leakin’ out.’
Unnoticed by Ryker, the barrel of his Colt had slowed down and was no longer covering all of the hunting party. He hadn’t realized that, wrapped up in his talking. But two or three of Quartermain’s men had spotted it.
‘Reciprocatin’ cylinder. Square bolt comes through the standin’ breech, driven forward by the hammer breast. Cylinder return disengages the chamber mouth from the back of the barrel. That’s done by a little horseshoe spring fitted to the hammer group. Don’t come with a rammer. Not a proper one. Just a wooden rod in the box. I spotted your’n has a rammer fitted on below the barrel, Mr. Quartermain.’
The Englishman nodded, his monocle glinting in the golden light.
‘Nice shape to the grip. Rounder than most American pistols and … Jesus!’
He was nearly too late. But the hours of blistering practice behind his store in the township of Settlement, way up on the Rio Verde in Arizona Territory, paid dividends. It gave him a blinding speed of reflex that none of the hunters really expected.
It wasn’t any of the men at the front. Quartermain still stood motionless. The kid with the fast draw, the little man with the scar and the boy with the torn shirt. None of them moved. Rupert swayed on the balls of his feet as if he was going for his knife, then he changed his mind and kept still.
Shielded by them, the three others had exchanged glances during the time that Ryker was talking and not shooting. And all three of them made their move simultaneously. One dropping to his knees and drawing and shooting between Quartermain and the scar-faced man. The other two dived in opposite directions, rolling over and coming up firing.
Ryker didn’t have any time to think about what he was going to do. Like any top shootist he acted first and then took the time to think about what he’d done. The biggest danger was the man in the middle, partly shielded. The others were still moving and would take that fraction of stolen seconds longer to open fire on him.
Ryker began to move sideways, going into the gunfighter’s crouch, half-turning his body to present a smaller target, his right arm extending. Finger squeezing.
The hunting party almost disappeared behind a screen of powder smoke, and the Colt Navy kicked against his wrist. There wasn’t time to check out the effect of the bullet. The other two men were already coming to the aim.
Both men carried Army Colts. That was all that Ryker had noticed. Not one of the new Tranters or Adams. Good, solid, old-fashioned, reliable pistols.
He squeezed off a snap shot at the man on the right, having the satisfaction of seeing him topple backwards with a scream of pain, a burst of blood high in the center of the chest taking him out of the action. And from Ryker’s experience, a thirty-six bullet there would either have taken the top off the man’s heart or ripped his lungs apart. Either way, he wouldn’t need a second shot.
There was the muffled crack of the third man’s Colt firing, and the golden cherub at the bottom of the stairs, a few inches from Ryker’s elbow, exploded into splinters of plaster and whittled timber and gilt paint. Without wincing, the gunslinger steadied his right wrist with his left hand and shot the kneeling man through the center of the face. The slug blasted a hole between the eyes, shattering the top of the nose. Driving through the thin bone at the temple and angling sideways and down, bursting out through the skull again just behind the left ear. Punching a piece of bone out as big as a playing-card, brains and blood flooding on the sawdust-covered floor.
‘Don’t try it!’ Ryker yelled as he saw the rest of the hunting party starting to drop their hands and reach for their guns. The only one that took no notice of him was the young kid with the fast draw. Swiveling at the hips as his fingers tugged out his pistol from a holster set lower on the hip than Ryker would have advised. It looked good but there was that couple of inches further for the gun to travel.
As he brought his smoking Colt round to bear on the boy, Ryker noticed that the man he’d shot at first was still alive, crouched over and holding his belly with his left hand while the right struggled to bring up the pistol at the gunslinger.
Apart from the Navy Colt, Ryker also carried a pair of concealed Remington derringers. Forty-one caliber rimfire pistols. One in a special holster tailored into the right boot and the other snugly sheathed at the small of his back.
With four shots already fired from the thirty-six, and a boy drawing on him, as well as another man on the floor ready to try and kill him, Ryker didn’t have any margin for error. But there was something else. Just as he was counting, so he knew the rest of the hunting-party would also be checking on the shots fired. These weren’t ordinary trail-hands who might use their gun to knock in a nail on one day and to stir their stew the next. These were as mean a collection of evil men as Ryker had seen for a long time.
Quartermain watched the killing without moving, merely raising his eye-brows so that his monocle dropped out and dangled on a length of crimson ribbon.
Using the Colt in his right hand, Ryker shot the boy just as his gun cleared leather, the bullet taking him through the inside of the right arm, shattering the elbow joint into shreds of mangled bone and tendon, muscle and skin. The last round in the Navy thirty-six hit the man on the floor through the throat, kicking him over on his back with the impact, where he choked to death on the blood that poured into his ravaged lungs.
At the same time as he was firing off the last two rounds, Ryker was reaching round behind him for the reassuring chunkiness of the derringer’s walnut butt. Drawing and cocking it left-handed, covering the other five members of the hunting party with its gaping barrels.
‘Two more dead men in here. Labels waiting for names to put on ’em. Keep real still, folks. ’Specially you, Quartermain. Lot of killin’ already here. Play the cards right and you get to talk about this in your old age.’
Nobody moved.
Except for the kid with the broken elbow. He had dropped to his knees, face contorted with agony, eyes squeezed shut in a vain effort to drive away the pain. Holding the dripping remains of his right arm in his left hand, blood coursing between his fingers and mingling with the large pool that dappled the floor around the men’s boots.
‘There’s only two bullets in that toy, Mr. Ryker. Five of us. Discounting young Cal Murray here. And by the look of that arm of his, he will be of little further use to me. Let us say, there are four of us.’
Ryker grinned. A smile that was as cold as a grave and never reached the flint of his eyes. ‘Means the last two of you get a chance to kill me. I got two more of these little pistols about me.’
‘I believe that you are attempting to bluff me, my dear chap. Not a thing I like.’ Quartermain’s smile held as much humor as Ryker’s. The gunslinger could feel the anger and hatred against him. But the big man was no fool, despite his strange clothes and odd way of talking. He was content to see his hired guns wasted around him, but he wasn’t going to take a chance himself. Ryker had won. He knew that.
Not that it made him feel happy.
Killing men without bounties was a pointless exercise.
The boy was moaning, his long, dirty hair dangling across his face as he rocked himself backwards and forwards. He looked up at Ryker and he was crying. ‘You done my arm, you damned bastard.’
‘Right. I was tryin’ to kill you, boy. You were lucky there.’
‘Lucky!’
‘Sure. That arm won’t ever draw fast again. But you get to live.’
‘What the hell’s the point of livin’? I don’t rightly know what livin’ is, you whorin’ bitchin’ bastard!’
Ryker shook his head slowly. ‘Living, boy. Living is just the mistakes you don’t make.’
‘Upon my soul, sir. I like that. You have a way with words nearly as fine as your way with guns. I tell you, sir, that I enjoy talking to a man who enjoys talking.’
‘Shut up, Quartermain. There’s men dead around you. Their blood’s all over your boots. Mouthy people like you make me want to throw up. Get out of Tucson. Stay out of Tucson. Sheriff Nolan’s on a vacation or he’d be here and you’d be in jail.’
‘I have bought my way out of more jails than you have drunk black coffee. This will not be any different to the rest.’
The man with the scar spoke, the first of them to make a sound after the shooting began.
‘Nolan’s a tough son of a bitch, Boss. Maybe we ought to …’
‘Move on? I don’t like being told to go. Still, when faced with unpleasant alternatives a wise man chooses the least …’
‘Guns down there. Pick ’em up at dawn on your way out. Come on, Quartermain. Or I’ll put a bullet through your elbow and see if that keeps you smilin’.’
Slowly, with Ryker watching them like a mountain eagle, Quartermain and his men threw down their guns. Untying the thongs from their thighs and unbuckling the heavy belts. Letting them drop to the floor of the What Cheer, among the sticky pools of crimson. ‘Take the boy with you.’
With a wave of the hand Quartermain motioned two of his men to drag out the weeping kid, the trail of blood from the arm following him across the saloon and disappearing through the bat-wing doors. Only the massive figure of the Englishman was left, silhouetted against a guttering lamp.
‘I shall leave tomorrow. But believe me, Mr. Ryker, I know that you and I will meet again. And then we shall see. Yes … Good night to you. Until the next time. Until the last time.’
Chapter Three
‘YOU MADE YOURSELF a real bad enemy there, Mr. Ryker.’
Sheriff Frank Nolan, one of the few people living that deserved the tag of ‘friend’ to Jack Ryker, had been the man responsible for showing him the way he could use his skill with guns to make a whole bagful of dollars. If Ryker had stayed with repairing weapons he’d have lived and died a secure, responsible citizen with little money and a small horizon. But by exploiting his gift for using those guns, Nolan had pointed to a different style of living. And, maybe, of dying.
Whenever Ryker was short of money he’d pass through Tucson and flick through the pile of ‘wanted’ flyers and see if there was anything there that took his fancy. That had been his way now for several years and a close relationship had grown between the two men.
Nolan was older than Ryker and a deal fatter. Each year there was a new insert into the leather gun-belt to support the spreading girth. And his eating grew and his suffering from gas grew with it. A meal with Frank Nolan, ’specially if chili and beans were on the menu, was enough to daunt the bravest heart.
But this visit, Nolan was away on vacation.
Slim Bowyer was the deputy. A lean man who Ryker wouldn’t have trusted to sweep horse-droppings from an empty corral. He was rather like Bart Haggard. A nice guy who would close up his ears when there was shooting and only stir from the office when someone came and fetched him. The killings in the What Cheer had upset him and he was still visibly nervous the next morning when Ryker came in to see him. The bodies had been taken away and Bowyer had taken a statement from Bart Haggard and one from Solomon King. Ryker hadn’t bothered to write anything down. He knew Nolan wouldn’t be that interested. As long as it was only shootists who killed each other then the sheriff was content to leave it at that and not probe any further.
Bowyer carried Nolan’s old hand gun. A massive sixty-one Savage, weighing better than three and a half pounds with an overall length of fourteen inches. For all that weight it only pumped out a thirty-six caliber bullet and it had the additional complication of the cocking-lever inside a conventional trigger-guard.
